MIT Sloan Management Review Fall 2016

The impact of digital technology on how businesses design and produce goods, interact with their supply chains, manage internal communication, and connect with customers is a rich topic that has been, and continues to be, broadly addressed in both commercial and academic business media. But as the digital revolution enters its next phase, we find ourselves confronting a new set of questions about the relationship between technology and management. These questions go to the core of the organization: How will big data inform hiring decisions?What happens to marketing when marketers can map consumers’ brain patterns?Are new communication technologies really delivering on the promise to empower frontline workers, or are they unleashing organizational chaos?What role will algorithms play in creating corporate strategy?How do you give performance feedback to a machine? How will our…

This year’s Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize goes to the spring 2015 MIT SMR article by Fabian J. Sting, Christoph H. Loch, and Dirk Stempfhuber titled “Accelerating Projects by Encouraging Help.” In this article, the authors examine the difficulties organizations face in project planning and execution and describe a management innovation used by Roto Frank, a German company that produces hardware for windows and doors, to augment its project control system. The company designed a help process that encourages workers to seek and provide mutual assistance. The authors found that the help process led to measurable improvements in the company’s project cycle time without changing formal incentives or other management systems. In their view, the success was largely based on two factors: the psychological safety the process afforded the workers and the…

Editor’s Note: This article is one of a special series of 14 commissioned essays MIT Sloan Management Review is publishing to celebrate the launch of our new Frontiers initiative. Each essay gives the author’s response to this question: “Within the next five years, how will technology change the practice of management in a way we have not yet witnessed?” I’ve been thinking about technology and management for over a decade. In the process, I have written two books describing some of the ways that the practice of management will respond to rapid technological innovations. Looking back, I made four predictions about management and technology. First, it was clear to me that the manager’s role as a coordinator of work would come under increasing pressure. Constant improvements in robotics and machine learning, in conjunction…

Editor’s Note: This article is one of a special series of 14 commissioned essays MIT Sloan Management Review is publishing to celebrate the launch of our new Frontiers initiative. Each essay gives the author’s response to this question: “Within the next five years, how will technology change the practice of management in a way we have not yet witnessed?” Science fiction writer William Gibson once said, “The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” You don’t need to wait five years to see how technology will change the practice of management. You just need to study companies that are already living in the future that remains around the corner for everyone else. You must also reframe what you see so that you aren’t blinded by what you already know. Consider…

Editor’s Note: This article is one of a special series of 14 commissioned essays MIT Sloan Management Review is publishing to celebrate the launch of our new Frontiers initiative. Each essay gives the author’s response to this question: “Within the next five years, how will technology change the practice of management in a way we have not yet witnessed?” If you want to see how management is changing, take a look inside today’s high-tech offices. In the past, corporate leaders sat behind closed doors in large private suites. Today, many sit side by side with employees in open workspaces. In the past, workers toiled alone in cubicles, waiting for formal meetings to speak with their managers and colleagues. Today, they turn and chat with the managers and colleagues sitting right next to…

Editor’s Note: This article is one of a special series of 14 commissioned essays MIT Sloan Management Review is publishing to celebrate the launch of our new Frontiers initiative. Each essay gives the author’s response to this question: “Within the next five years, how will technology change the practice of management in a way we have not yet witnessed?” Currently, only top managers have human executive assistants, but in the near future, everyone who has a smartphone can have a digital executive assistant. This will be made possible by the “mobile cloud” — technology that integrates the convenience of the mobile phone with the power of cloud computing. The mobile phone interface will shift toward interactive voice communication — just like communicating with a human assistant — but your digital agent will…